hmmm, less successful Crying Game?

“M. Butterfly” is great source material for David Cronenberg, taking on this true story, adapted by David Henry Hwang as an operatic broadway play. There’s no singing here, but there is body modification and its effects- a decidedly complicated romance reduced to the simplest of terms by one partner while the other is secretly playing them.

Set in 1964 China, Jeremy Irons’ Rene Gallimard is a French diplomat who instantly falls under the spell of Song Liling (John Lone), the operatic diva starring in Madame Butterfly on stage. It will be the first time Gallimard sees the play performed, and Liling has a theory that Westerners love it so much because it is about an oriental so beholden to a Westerner, that she eventually kills herself over him. It may very well be that Gallimard is so interested in this new lady because she’s exotic, or it could just be that she is perceived as the perfect woman, because she knows exactly what a man wants.

There is particular reason for that, one goes back hundreds of years in theatrical productions, and one which seems to go right over Gallimard’s head while i’d say everyone else in the audience is thinking “Crying Game”. Lone is not a convincing woman and i’m assuming he’s supposed to be. There’s also some serious plot holes in regards to the relationship itself. When Liling refuses to take her clothes off during sex; Rene acquiesces to the request, though it’s hard to imagine him not discovering something during the lovemaking.

But Irons is so good in the role that he makes you wonder if most relationships aren’t just based on living in your own little fantasy. His Rene begins as a meek accountant who suddenly begins to lay himself bare at the idea of possessing her. She is his, and he is so in love with the illusion that nothing else really matters. And if the romance seems staged, that’s because it is. Liling has way more than one secret, which involves spying and sussing out illegal activity for the Chinese government, and where this all gets very complicated is that Liling is really just a cover to work the Frenchman.

Love and betrayal are supposed to intermingle here for a very big, operatic ending yet Cronenberg never gets it all the way there. The passion always feels like an act and the betrayal is inevitable. There are themes here of East vs. Western ideology that are interesting and Irons’ vulnerability clearly wins the movie, but with a lot of the rest of it, Cronenberg shows his hand far too early.